It is the year 2026. You are in 25 Discord servers. Six of them are for your friends and family, one of them is so you can create custom emojis, one is just called “the chungle zone”, you do not remember how you joined it. The rest are all videogames you haven’t played in months.
I cannot say I’m exactly thrilled about the seeming legal requirement for every single videogame to have a Discord server now, nor am I—admittedly as someone whose job it is to keep up with these things—particularly jazzed about the fact that a lot of game companies are using said servers for their entire news cycle. I hear the Discord ping in my sleep.
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The panel recommends that games recruit players into their Discord communities “as early as possible”, but this is a talk given by Discord. More frustrating than my grumpiness at the current state of affairs is the fact that they’re probably right.
As much as I’d like there to be, given recent privacy concerns and tie-ins to Palantir, Lu here is likely correct in that yes, if you want your game to have outreach, you probably need a Discord server, because who is gonna make a full new account for a forum? Even if I yearn for the good old days, I’m not entirely convinced I would.
Still, as those debacles did prove, it’s probably not great that we’re all tethered by the cuff to a tech company who, at any point, can decide to lose its mind and start rubbing shoulders with data-harvesting monoliths presently constructing the torment nexus.
